by Raynor Winn
‘How are you going to be able to use that? It’s going to really hurt your shoulder.’
‘I don’t know, but I’m going to try.’
I walked away; I couldn’t bear to watch. I went back inside to continue scraping wallpaper. The ring of an email arriving on my mobile broke through the familiar thrum of Moth trying to start a pull-motor that refused to work. The reluctant chugging noise that, if I closed my eyes, would take me straight back to our home in Wales and sunny afternoons when the beech trees were full of bees and swallows filled the air. I kept my eyes open and read the email.
‘Hi, Ray, just wondering how the introduction for Copsford is coming along. It’s going to print soon, so when you’re ready …’
Had I absolutely agreed to do this? Somewhere in the confusion of book events and coming to the farm I’d obviously committed to it. But how could I? What could I possibly say? I’d recently bought a small, obscure biography of the life of Walter J. C. Murray; maybe if I actually read it I could find something more to Copsford than it superficially presented.
The strimmer was humming and Moth disappeared into the undergrowth leaving a mown path behind him. The biography was in the kitchen cupboard. I’d had it posted to the farm, expecting to have moved in weeks before, so I put the wallpaper scraper down, switched the kettle on and found the book. Written by a man who clearly adored Murray’s writing, the pages explored the events of his life and his Christian beliefs. A life in which he loved nature but didn’t allow that feeling to surpass his religion. I couldn’t quite see what it was, but there was a contradiction between the man in the biography and the young man in Copsford. An impression that I wasn’t reading about the same person. It made no sense, but I continued reading anyway.
An hour later Moth stood on a broad patch of cut grass. A muddy, scrappy expanse covered with the cut stalks of nettles, thistles and tufted grass. An expanse of possibility; a garden in the making. He came into the house, took off his goggles, sat on the deckchair in front of the fire and went instantly to sleep. How could I possibly have thought coming here was a good idea? I watched him sleep, his chin resting on his chest, his head moving rhythmically with his breathing as I closed the book. I realized I’d found them: Murray and Walter, the writer and the young man he wrote about. I finally understood they were one and the same, and entirely separate. I opened the laptop. Darkness fell and firelight flickered colours across the walls as I began to write the introduction.
21. Moles
The pale underwings of the buzzard were barely distinguishable against the flat grey backdrop of unbroken cloud, stretched out across a late-winter sky. His dark-edged wings, tail and head gave him a deep brown outline, making his body seem nearly translucent. This was his valley. Each morning he flew north to south across the farm, following the line of the old deciduous trees that hid the stream, before banking to the west to come to rest on a fence above the new orchard or the telegraph pole by the cider barn. But this morning he was distracted by something moving in the small field behind the house. Voles probably, their tunnels spread under the grass in a hidden network of rodent highways.
Just a few weeks earlier we’d closed the door of the chapel for the last time, leaving behind the safety and easy security it represented, and moved full-time into the farm. A wild, improbable leap of hope to a neglected farm in need of committed attention. Unaware that in a few short weeks’ time The Salt Path would go into paperback, the demand for book events and interviews would escalate and my time would be spread paper-thin. I wanted to attract Moth’s attention to the buzzard hanging almost motionless in the still air, but he was beyond reach. Lost in the enfolding undergrowth of the long-neglected orchard, where cankered branches hung twisted and gnarled to the ground, grown through with long tufted grass or overgrown with brambles into mounds of thorns fifteen feet high. Struggling to get moving each morning and sleeping twelve hours a night, Moth’s days were short, but filled with sawing, stacking, strimming and mowing. Slowly, slowly, the trees were beginning to emerge behind him as he made more holes in his belt to hold his jeans up. Trees stripped of old dead, broken or diseased wood began to lift a little higher, as if straightening after years of stooping. And he strimmed on. Rhythmically swinging the machine from side to side he made tunnels through the wild growth, letting in light where there had been none for years.
With the light came more life. Small birds were finding their way into the trees. And with the shorter grass other life was moving in. Molehills appeared, following the green paths out of the trees, clustering at the side of the hedge, but then reappearing on the other side and away up the hill. Commercial agriculturalists would list moles as pests of the highest order, digging through the earth at a rate of up to twenty metres a day, producing mounds of earth as they go and spoiling huge areas of grassland. For generations farmers have dug them out, poisoned and gassed them out, all in pursuit of perfect grassland. But moles eat grubs, bugs, slugs and all manner of underground life that can equally destroy crops from the root upwards. Pests that, if they’re not eaten by moles, would be destroyed with poisons, poisons which can then kill the birdlife that might feed on the pests. Poison the pest, having poisoned its predator the mole: obviously the logical course of action. The buzzard fell like a dart from the sky, hesitating for a while in the grass before lifting off, a deep-black mole grasped in its talons. Plucked from the earth as its nose broke the surface of a molehill, its feet still digging hopelessly through the air. A predator chain in action.
Walter Murray would have embraced that moment in both his incarnations: as a young man and an older writer. As the months went by and Walter’s herb stores began to fill, he found himself learning to be still, to embrace nature in a way that was ‘closer contact than touch, it was almost union’. Murray wrote about this younger version of himself as his ‘nature spirit’. Something innocent and naïve that he replaced in later life with a deeply Christian man. As if embracing nature in such an absolute way was something to be put away in the toy box, not carried through into adult life. I’d watched my own children running through fields of buttercups, standing knee-deep in muddy water trying to catch elvers as they ran downstream, or sitting in trees idling away an afternoon. Their wild, uncontrolled union with the natural world had been a normal part of their lives, not something to be put away as childish, but the foundation of the adults they became. Murray became a nature writer, thought of as a forerunner to Deakin and Macfarlane, and yet none of his other writing holds that elusive connection that he writes of in Copsford. I’d finally found what informed that book, what gave it the depth and light, what it was he was searching for in the descriptions of herbs, something he didn’t even hint at in his other books.
Murray wrote about Walter long after he’d left Copsford, but very shortly after the death of his only son, Dick, when the boy was just fifteen. He doesn’t mention his son in the book; he barely talks of his emotions other than his response to nature, or of death other than recording the extinction of a butterfly. But it’s impossible to believe that as he wrote those words his son wasn’t ever present in his thoughts, guiding his pen, filling the pages. It’s as if he used Copsford to give Dick the youth he didn’t have, to recreate the life he’d lost. The words don’t just capture the spirit of his own youth, but hold his son within them too. Within Walter’s year at Copsford, Dick lives on. Permanently on the page in the herbs and flowers of the hedgerows of post-war Sussex.
As Moth walked back to the house I realized why I was so drawn to Copsford. It was more than sharing Walter’s sense of union with nature; it was an understanding of Murray. How, maybe without even consciously intending to, he had put Dick in a place where he could always find him, a place Murray could always return to.
‘Fuck me, I’m totally knackered and I’ve run out of petrol.’ Moth put the strimmer down on the concrete. Hot and sweating under the plastic goggles and earmuffs despite the cold wind, he unbuckled the strimmer harness and peeled off his j
umper in one smooth action. ‘Is the kettle on?’
In the pile of books on the table waiting to be signed, Moth would always lift his rucksack and turn his face to the wind, never fading, never lost, always beckoning me on to the next page, the next adventure.
‘We’re just crossing the fields to check the osprey nests, hope that’s okay?’ A man in a National Trust T-shirt sat on a quad bike in the farmyard; another stood at the door having just got out of a four-by-four that was loaded up with small tree trunks and wire.
‘Osprey nests, what osprey nests?’
‘Well, they’re not nests, not yet. They’re platforms.’
‘Where are these platforms? I haven’t seen them.’
The man at the door pointed to two poles in the field on the far horizon. Two strange contraptions that I thought were abandoned, misplaced telegraph poles.
‘I thought ospreys went back to the same nest every year, not to a new one?’
‘They do. The idea is that any young osprey looking for their first nesting site will see the platforms and think they’re old osprey nests and choose to reuse one. We’re going up there to attach some new branches, replace the broken ones.’
‘Have they used them yet?’
‘No, we’re just hoping to attract one that might be passing on its migration path back from Africa. The herons are near there, so we know the river’s a great food source for fish-eaters.’
‘I thought herons were just waders.’ But the quad bike was already revving to leave.
We followed the rounded ridgeline at the top of the hill, across the fields that formed the highest part of the farm. From there the farm sloped on both sides: on one, to the river where the tide was out, leaving deep brown mudflats glistening in the low light, and to the valley on the other, where the house sat alone above the bare branches of the orchard. From the highest point near the would-be osprey nests, we headed steeply downhill to a broken gate and a field waist-high in thistles and nettles. A field so steep it was difficult to walk down, so we dodged the thistles and climbed the fence into a dark, dense strip of woodland that descended to the river. We followed the trees down, precariously holding on to the trunks of saplings to prevent a fall, stopping repeatedly to rest, or decide if we could go on, until we reached the edge of the wood and turned to follow the level ground along the boundary between the field and the mudflats at the creek’s edge.
Gnarled oaks and sycamore lined the creekside, but among them rose a group of old twisted trees that must have stood in that spot with their roots in the mud for hundreds of years. A familiar spot; we’d definitely seen a picture of that muddy brown riverbank in print. Closed in and overhung with willows, the creek winds its way straight off the cover of Sam’s book. There were no signs of Ratty or Mole, but high in the trees huge nests sat solidly in the branches, unmoved by the strong wind from the water. Scattered along the bank an occasional solitary heron stood silently observing the mud. Necks outstretched, ready to snatch anything that moved. We hadn’t known, until we’d looked into it after the National Trust men had left, that we were on land that bounded what is thought to be one of the largest heronries in Cornwall. It’s true that there were many nests in the trees – not as many as the river-watchers think, but more than I’d ever seen in one place. Yet there were only three herons here. Herons spread out after the breeding season, dispersing across the countryside to live their solitary lives, but coming back to the nests in February for the start of three months of communal living. Mid-February now, they should be here, the males repairing their nests and putting on their best displays for the females. We scoured the area with the binoculars, but there were no more to be seen. Maybe they’d gone down the river with the outgoing tide? Possibly not all the nests were used, or maybe some were migrants flying in to the heronry in the spring from Ireland and France, held up somewhere across the Channel waiting for the right weather conditions? Or maybe they were far fewer in number than the nests would suggest, and the twiggy platforms were more resilient than the species that inhabited them.
‘We’ll come back in a few weeks. It’s still early, but by then we’ll definitely see if they’re nesting.’
‘I’m not sure if we will. We’ve got to climb back up that hill somehow.’
‘Shall we come by boat next time?’
Throughout history birds have been seen as auguries, messengers and omens. In the Iliad Athena sends a heron as an omen to Odysseus as he carries out a risky night mission into the enemy camp. Supposedly the call of the heron offered comfort to the night raiders. If the empty heronry was an omen of anything now, it undoubtedly wasn’t of comfort.
In the early light of a late February morning, an omen sat on the telegraph pole just outside the house. The mist from the river had engulfed the orchards, but as the light lifted the mist began to clear, showing a new trail of molehills stretching out of the trees. Not just one creating mole highways under the grass then, but a whole family of them. Above the trail of soil mounds, on the telegraph pole near the house, a huge bird sat quietly looking around. A tall bird with a white chest and darkest brown back. Could it be an osprey? I wanted to google to check, wake Moth so he could see it, point the bird in the direction of the would-be nests, but I daren’t turn from the window in case the slightest move alerted him. He casually moved a few feathers with his hooked black beak, stretched out an immense wingspan, lifted slowly from the pole and away, his huge wings arching in an undeniably osprey motion.
‘Wow, Moth, you should have seen that. Quick, get up before it disappears.’
Moth sat up without help, swivelled round on the bed and was by my side in seconds as the osprey looped across the barns, over the hill and headed inland.
‘Fuck, was that an osprey?’
I looked at the empty bed and at Moth standing by my side in a baggy T-shirt and shorts now two sizes too big. Standing alone in the early morning, without my help.
‘No, I think it was a sign.’
22. Badgers
In the late afternoon a large fox wandered around the slope of an empty field through grass up to his belly, his rich auburn coat catching the light, a burnished body pushing through the thick green growth. He criss-crossed the field, abstractedly following an unseen path, his head down and out of sight, then up again and smelling the air.
The fox’s main food sources are small rodents and rabbits. But foxes are opportunistic hunters and if their natural food source has gone, they’ll take food where they can find it. It’s well known that they will occasionally kill young lambs – born in the spring, just at the moment when the fox has a den full of cubs to feed. I’d stood in our field in Wales and watched two foxes rip a lamb apart. A hideous sight. I’d chased another as it jumped through the hedge with the last hen in its mouth, after it had spent the night emptying the hen pen. But I’d also followed Dad through the fields as he shot rabbits that had exploded in numbers and were decimating the cornfields in the years after every fox in the district had been removed. I’d watched him poison the rats too, and the mice. And the water voles.
But far more persecuted than the fox or rabbit is the badger. Bovine TB is an ever-present disease among the cattle population of the UK. Cattle are regularly tested for the infection and any animal testing positive is slaughtered – leaving farmers to endure the financial and emotional heartache of losing their livestock. Alongside humans, badgers can also contract TB, a disease that’s equally deadly for cattle, humans and badgers alike. Most of us have been vaccinated against the disease, but to combat the spread among cattle we don’t use vaccines, we cull badgers instead. It’s commonly thought that badgers spread TB to cattle, so the government approves culls across an area of this country larger than Israel, causing localized extinctions of an animal that has inhabited this island since the Ice Age. As a child our pedigree herd of cattle was termed ‘accredited’. In the 1960s and 70s that meant the herd was tested and proved to be TB-free. Free to live and roam the fields that were surroun
ded by woods. The same woods where badgers lived, silently getting on with their lives. TB-free. A bovine vaccine exists and yet we don’t vaccinate cattle, as apparently it’s impossible to develop a test that will differentiate between a vaccinated cow and one infected with TB. We encourage mothers to vaccinate their child against every possible disease and yet a cow that is tracked and traced from birth can’t be injected with a vaccine that’s readily available, a vaccine that could be visible and readable on their record, like any human medical record. So the cull goes on, and yet the numbers of cattle with bovine TB don’t fall. Possibly they’re not catching TB from the badgers after all, but, like the common cold, from each other.
Rarely seen, other than as roadkill on the side of the motorway or playfully running around their sett on an episode of Springwatch, the badger stays low, hidden in the woods and hedgerows. Safe in their world of undergrowth, on their diet of grubs, mice and ripe fruit, only ever venturing into the fields in the dark of night, vulnerable to any infection that might be lying waiting for them in the grass.
At what point in our lives does cynicism take over from instinct? When we stop feeling the softness of rain on our face and start worrying about being wet? Stop marvelling at the wonder of a badger rooting through the grass in the twilight, stop listening to the sounds carried on the wind or the echo of ourselves inside it? Or when we hear the young voice of an activist on the radio and doubt its validity? When do we make that switch from being part of the natural world to being an observer with an assumed right to control it?
As Murray was writing Copsford, he looked back at Walter, a naïve twenty-something, wandering in the fields picking herbs, and painted a picture of a discovery of life and nature in a landscape that has gone. There are few areas now where you can walk through meadows and collect armfuls of foxgloves and centaury. There are few people who have heard of centaury, fewer still who have seen it in the grass and heathlands it used to inhabit in abundance. Even as Murray wrote the lines in the years after the Second World War, decades after he hid in the bushes watching the girl he loved picking blackberries, he could see that the countryside was changing, that plants and animals were disappearing, unnoticed and unseen. Simply fading from sight as people lost their connection to nature and became mere observers.